Just over a month has passed since the terrible discovery of two brothers, aged seven and ten, allegedly murdered by their father, who also died in the Horta apartment where they lived. The homicide group of the Mossos d’Esquadra of Barcelona continues working based on the story of the statements from the family and work environment of the alleged murderer to try to find what is called the etiology, the cause that led to the 53-year-old man years to end the lives of his children and his own.
At this point, the Catalan police have no doubt that it was a double murder with suicide. Three deaths caused by the inhalation of carbon monoxide emitted throughout the early hours of Monday from a charcoal brazier fed with numerous ignition tablets.
The doubts were dispelled on Monday afternoon, as soon as the homicide police and the scientific police entered the basement and carefully carried out the visual inspection. Nothing went unnoticed. Especially what they found in the kitchen. On the countertop of the room, quite tidy and clean, they found an empty blister of valerians, and right next to it, a plate with traces of white powder that they took to analyze. It is likely that all of them felt a chill as they reconstructed in their minds the sequence that the father must have carried out on Sunday night, when he put his two children to sleep. They suspected from the first moment that the plate was used to cut and crush the pills that could later be diluted either in water or in one of the yogurts that were also found empty in the kitchen. It is possible that the little ones had pétit suisse for dinner that night. All the children love them and the valerians had been mixed with the yogurt or in the water. At the foot of each of the beds in which the bodies were found, the Mossos found two bottles of water, which they also took to analyze. As they did with the brazier and other elements of the terrible scene, essential for the reconstruction of those previous hours.
This week, the Catalan police had not yet received the toxic results of the samples from the two brothers and their alleged murderer. Results that will confirm the suspicion that these valerians were used to make the children enter a deep sleep from which they never woke up.
The bodies were discovered on Monday afternoon after the desperate mother did not hear from her children and discovered through a phone call from the school that they had not gone to class that day. Her ex-husband asked her on Sunday that the children should stay the night with him, that she would be in charge of taking them to school and that she could pick them up later.
The Barcelona Firefighters entered the house through a window and discovered the terrifying scene. They still had to ventilate the smoke that persisted, despite the hours that had passed. The man had blocked the air inlets and outlets, and all three died from carbon monoxide inhalation. The girl next to him on the sofa bed in the living room, and the boy on the upper bunk in her room.
The parents had been separated for almost a year and, as the Superior Court of Justice of Catalonia stated in a statement, there were no previous complaints, neither in the civil nor criminal sphere. That does not mean that double crime cannot be classified as vicarious violence, although it has not emerged to date that researchers have found elements that support this thesis.
In recent days, the man’s family insisted again on the impossibility of responsibility on the part of the man and continued to insist on the accident. His mother and grandmother of the little ones assured that her son had experienced firsthand the abuse of his father, with repeated “beatings.” “With what he already suffered, it is impossible for him to want to harm his children,” said his paternal grandmother. Forensic psychiatrists, however, believe just the opposite.
